Join Sanders from 7pm ET as he convenes a discussion on inequality with Elizabeth Warren, Michael Moore and more guests

Watch live as Senator Bernie Sanders hosts a town hall on inequality in America. Sanders has said: “The issue of oligarchy and wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time. It is the great economic issue of our time and it is the great political issue of our time, yet it gets very little coverage from the corporate media.” To discuss inequality, he has convened a town hall in Washington DC with Senator Elizabeth Warren, film-maker Michael Moore, economist Darrick Hamilton and other experts.

Activist investor Ed Bramson, not known for his charm, makes a move into the big league

Get ready for some sport at Barclays. Edward Bramson, an activist investor out of New York with a taste for barging into boardrooms and metaphorically smashing up the crockery, has unveiled a 5% stake in the bank.

Previous UK targets have included F&C Asset Management, Electra Private Equity and 3i, so Barclays represents a major step-up in ambition. It’s one thing to make a splash in the lower leagues of London financial firms, but another to try to call the shots at a highly regulated high street lender.

GKN shares slide as first meeting between union and takeover specialists ends in acrimony

A “full and frank” meeting between trade union officials and the company mounting an £8bn hostile takeover for GKN broke up in acrimony on Monday amid accusations that the would-be buyer would not give assurances on future investment.

Unite said it had no confidence in bidder Melrose following the meeting, the first time the two sides had got around the table since the controversial hostile bid for GKN was unveiled in January.

Lever, Reckitt and GKN are today’s only top 50 British companies surviving from 1905. Lever merged with Margarine Unie in 1930, forming Unilever. Reckitt merged first with Colman then with Benckiser, from Holland, forming Reckitt Benckiser in 1990. While Reed Elsevier/RELX has so far been happy to invest in Britain, it, Reckitt Benckiser and even Royal Dutch Shell could soon face similar dilemmas to Unilever’s. GKN, established in 1759, is today under hostile attack from Melrose, an aggressive financial restructurer whose market capitalisation jump has come in just the last two years. There is a reason why it is one of the most shorted major stocks on the market: it made losses in 2016, its most recent full accounting year, and its gearing has fluctuated wildly over its short history.

An activist investor has built up a 5% stake in Barclays in an attempt to shake up the bank’s strategy and boost its share price.

Barclays announced on Monday that Ed Bramson’s Sherborne Investors had “acquired voting rights over 5.16% of Barclays’ issued share capital”. The stakebuilding by Sherborne, which describes itself as a “turnaround investment firm”, makes it Barclays’ fourth-biggest investor after US asset managers Capital Group and BlackRock, and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

Retirees might have lower incomes but more wealth because of property and superannuation. That’s why housing affordability is so crucial

The ALP’s policy to end the cash rebate of dividend imputation has brought out the usual pre-budget argument over who is rich a bit earlier than usual. But the debate has also very nicely brought attention to the importance of wealth holdings. This is vital because as people enter retirement they can be quite income poor (and very much taxable-income poor) but have very large holdings of wealth.

It is no surprise that the issue of franking credits has focused on retirees, because overwhelmingly they are the ones who receive them.

Company becomes the latest mall fixture to declare bankruptcy following Toys R Us and Sports Authority

America’s teens may have to find somewhere else to get their ears pierced. Claire’s, the chainstore known for its tween jewelry and ear piercing, declared bankruptcy on Monday, the latest retailer to succumb to the online shopping revolution.

Claire’s made the move as it announced it was looking to restructure $1.9bn in debts it built up after being taken over by Apollo Global Management in 2007. The company has struggled as mall traffic has declined and becomes the latest mall fixture to declare bankruptcy following Toys R Us and Sports Authority.

The time has come for national governments around the world to start issuing their debt in a new form, linked to their countries’ resources. GDP-linked bonds, with coupons and principal that rise and fall in proportion to the issuing country’s GDP, promise to solve many fundamental problems that governments face when their countries’ economies falter. And, once GDP-linked bonds are issued by a variety of countries, investors will be attracted by the prospect of high returns when some of these countries do very well.

This new debt instrument is especially exciting because of its monumental size. Although issues may start out small, they will be very important from the outset. The capitalised value of total global GDP is worth far more than the world’s stock markets and could be valued today in the quadrillions of US dollars.

Reuters reckons the takeover battle for GKN is heating up today, with both sides sweetening their pitch to shareholders.

They write:

Melrose, making a hostile bid, said it would inject about 1 billion pounds ($1.39 billion) into GKN’s pension scheme, its latest attempt to convince shareholders to back its offer and win over political opponents of the deal.

Shareholders have until March 29 to decide on that offer.

And the GKN story gets yet more convoluted - Melrose trims acceptance condition, said to pump money into pension scheme, while Dana will seek listing after merger with GKN Driveline. Saga. https://t.co/ru85J7o2ok

Britain’s accounting watchdog has started an investigation into two former finance directors of Carillion, the construction firm that collapsed in January, confirming last week’s Guardian report.

The Financial Reporting Council said is investigating the conduct of Richard Adam and Zafar Khan, in relation to their reporting of financial statements of the failed government contractor and other financial information for the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 and the six months to 30 June 2017.

Growing calls in US and UK for investigations to explain data breach affecting tens of millions

Facebook and the analytics company that worked with Donald Trump’s election team have come under mounting pressure, with calls for investigations and hearings to explain a vast data breach that affected tens of millions of people.

In Britain, the head of the parliamentary committee investigating fake news accused Cambridge Analytica and Facebook of misleading MPs after revelations in the Observer that more than 50m Facebook profiles were harvested and used to build a system that may have influenced voters in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Business group wants Britain to become associate member of R&D programme after Brexit

Britain’s biggest business lobby group is seeking to prevent the loss of as much as €1bn (£882m) in annual European funding for scientific research and technological development, which has been thrown into doubt by Brexit.

According to a briefing paper seen by the Guardian, the CBI is calling for the government to state its intention to renew its membership of the EU framework programme for research and development after Brexit. Failure to take such steps could further harm businesses already cutting their spending on research and discourage future investments, it says.

The expected rise in US interest rates will increase financial pressures on developing countries already struggling with a 60% jump in their debt repayments since 2014, a leading charity has warned.

The Jubilee Debt Campaign said a study of 126 developing nations showed that they were devoting more than 10% of their revenues on average to paying the interest on money borrowed – the highest level since before the G7 agreement to write off the debts of the world’s poorest nations at Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, anything purchased using a digital currency is liable to be taxed as a capital gain

The rollercoaster ride for some cryptocurrency investors could be about to take another tax-time lurch, according to experts, as the taxman looks for his share of transactions made using bitcoin and its like.

Wild fluctuations in the value of digital currencies – bitcoin surged from less than one dollar in 2010 to $997 at the start of the 2017 to nearly $20,000 before settling back to around $8,500 on Friday – have exposed investors to tax bills the value of their coins may no longer meet.

US protectionism is in accord with the spirit of the times – but it won’t have a happy ending

Much to the delight of Hollywood, Donald Trump wants to open a new front in his trade offensive by punishing China for theft of America’s intellectual property rights.

The US entertainment industry is not awfully keen on Trump, having strongly backed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, but is even less keen on its movies and TV shows being ripped off by the world’s most populous country.